Distractions
Don’t get too good at anything which is not central to what you want to do. The world in general and capitalism in particular will find ways to convince you that you should spend your time doing what you do well. The more you know, the better, because any particular approach might fail, but make sure you don’t set up motivational systems that work against you.
(I don’t do programming anymore.)
Artikel
Gut.
Wassis passiert?
Ich schätze er hat das getan, was er gut kann: nachdenken! ;-)
Ich habe aus wahrscheinlich dem gleichen Grund das Programmieren aufgegeben, also etwas das ich gut konnte. Nur ein Weg ein motivationales System aufzubauen welches mir selbst im Weg stand. Gut ausgedrückt. Den Link zum Kapitalismus habe ich bisher nicht gesehen, aber stimmt ebenso. Oder anders formuliert eine Art Hedonismus. Irgendwann realisierte ich, dass ich es nur tat weil es Spass machte, aber eine Vergeudung meines Wesens war. Also immer aufpassen und sich bewusst machen, weshalb man etwas wirklich tut. Danke für diese Erinnerung.
And what do you prefer?
Mathematics. I know more about programming than about math, but I’m about to change that.
However, the question is not whether I prefer math to programming in general, but which tool is most appropriate for what I want to do. You might as well have asked “How did your goals change?” and I would have quoted two paragraphs from my current “about me” page:
“I don’t want to find the shortest or fastest path towards artificial intelligence. I want to map the territory. I want to know what’s learnable, and how, and which limits there are for an intelligent agent’s ability to improve solely by learning from its interaction with the environment.
I don’t consider my work engineering intelligence, I think of it as a kind of metaphysics. Physics is about learning about the structure of our environment. Learning theory is about what intelligent agents can learn about arbitrary environments in principle.”
I remember you asking me something like the following: “Why do you program something from scratch, when there are so many (better) programs already out there, more or less exactly providing what you need?”
Well it is obvious, isn’t it? It is educational and fun. Programming tickles my mind and is the substitute for the pleasure I sadly can’t derive from math.
I just implemented a telnet client in python, ignoring the built in module “libtelnet”. It works. I won’t use it. But it was educational. Today, I also got 11 out of 12 in my math midterm exam, which was not half the fun. I envy you for enjoying something so pure as math. I can’t (yet). But I might be getting there. I’m certainly already beyond a point of no return.
(I’ve been doing LISP for two months now)
Writing programs for tasks that are already solved is quite similar to tackling math problems where the solution is known, and, as I do the latter a lot, I get what you mean.
On the other hand, if I knew enough math to be able to solve unsolved problems, I would not spend my time on exercises where I can look up the solution if I don’t know further. My point was that you do know enough about programming to do things that other people have not done before.
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